Saturday, April 25, 2015

On
Palm Sunday of this year, Reverend Edward Fride, of Christ the King
parish in Ann Arbor, Michigan, made himself temporarily famous by
announcing during the Mass that the parish would be conducting
qualifying classes for parishioners to carry concealed firearms.
This announcement was met with some resistance from parishioners, to
which Fr. Ed responded with a longish letter explaining his position.
That letter exploded across the internet, with titles like, “Priest
tells flock to pack heat.” This dust-up, in turn, compelled the
Bishop of Lansing to issue a (sensible, in my view) cease-and-desist
directive to Fr. Ed on gun training in the parish.

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

If you want to understand who is the true power behind the Honduran coup, you need to find out who is paying Lanny Davis.

-Robert White, former US Ambassador to El Salvador

If you begin with the military sector, the Honduran coup makers can
be sub-divided generally by tasks: military tasks, financial tasks,
political tasks, and media tasks. The old “send guns, money, and
lawyers” trope. Just add, “send well-heeled media.”

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

The consolidation phase had failed in Venezuela – in large part
through the strategic error of listening to a few bought Generals
telling the coup-makers the armed forces would follow the leader. It
didn’t hurt that this is what the coup-makers wanted to believe. The
young officers and the rank-and-file stood by the new popular
Constitution, and one of the three legs to the coup collapsed.
It’s formulaic in the extreme to break coups down this way, so I’ll
declaim early.

The three-leg theory of coup-making is necessary but
certainly not sufficient to explain this highly complex enterprise.
Those three legs are the three dimensions of destabilization: economic
disruption and imposed scarcity, political turmoil, and the willing
participation of the most powerful military/security institutions.

Friday, April 17, 2015

On July 1, 2010, Adrienne Pine, and American academic and activist
working in Honduras, penned her suspicions in an article for the online
site “Honduras Culture and Politics,” called “Honduran suspicions of US complicity in the coup.” (Part 2)
With the coup still shrouded in official secrecy, she was simply
recounting what she heard on the Honduran street. One of the stories on
the street was that Rolando Valenzeula had been murdered.

The North American ambassador accredited to Tegucigalpa,
Hugo Llorens, did know about the coup d’Etat against Manuel Zelaya
Rosales, the ex-minister of the Zelaya administration, Roland
Valenzuela, revealed days before his death, in an interview broadcast by
the journalist Ernesto Alonso Rojas, in a local radio station of the
city of San Pedro Sula.

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

We have talked about how the Fed has but one trick to command the economy (raising and lowering interest rates). Recently they discovered one more trick that is a form of temporary trauma management in the wake of 2008, called quantitative easing, which basically puts off the inevitable - making the rich richer in the meantime (the Dow as I write this is soaring past 18,000as the printing presses roll) - and ensures it will be much worse for the rest of us when the trick hits its limit. That is not the topic of this series, but there is much being said about it elsewhere.

[A] Hillary Clinton coronation would mean a Democratic nominee with close ties to Wall Street and the neoliberal wing of the party. . ."

-Noam Scheiber

Neoliberalism – A Short History

The notion that a great expansion of the size of ‘capital
markets’ is a symptom of positive trends in capitalist production is as
false as imagining that a vast expansion of the insurance industry is a
sign that the world is becoming a safer place.

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

This is a story, based on some facts… different than the stories we
hear from the media. Facts can be arranged to make a story. The media
had one story. This is another.

On June 28th, 2009, the legitimately elected and popular President Manuel Zelaya of Honduras was dragged
out of bed in his pajamas by Honduran soldiers, bound and beaten, flown
out of Honduras using the US military’s Soto Cano airfield, and sent
into exile. There was immediate and universal condemnation of the coup,
including from the United States. President Barack Obama condemned the
coup (without ever calling it a coup). So did Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The story faded from
the news. The Hondurans had some kind of election. Everything is okay
now.

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

This study guide for Borderline - Reflections on War, Sex, and Church is for two different kinds of people who might study what they read. Some might be obliged to study as formal students in a college or university. Others might study on their own initiative outside any institutional setting. As a result, the book might seem
to "talk up" to the average reader with twelve to fourteen years of
formal education, even as it seems to "talk down" in its explanations of
various ideas and terms to a graduate student in history, philosophy,
or theology. So there is something there to irritate everyone. The
intent, however, is not to talk up or down to anyone, but to be
accessible enough to both to be a bridge between these two worlds -
between those who are very well-schooled and those who are not, but who
on their own initiative are raising the kinds of questions that
sociology or history or philosophy or theology might raise. So I ask
both groups to be tolerant of the book on those accounts. In a sense, the book is intended to be a small contribution to breaking down what a
friend once called "the intellectual division of labor."